


No Provenance

by Zimraphel



Series: tolkien ficlets [7]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: And Argon is mostly forgotten by the 2nd age, Fingon has no wife Fingon needs no wife, Parent-child relationships, he was in that stage when one identifies a lot of things by taste, in which I contribute my solution to the gil-galad's dad debate, look Gil has some issues with not being able to remember arakano's face
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-18
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-14 16:02:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29544870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zimraphel/pseuds/Zimraphel
Summary: Gil-Galad loses his father, and Findekáno's braids gain their gold.-(Do you hate Gil-Galad as Orodreth’s son? Do you refuse to give Fingon a wife, but want the baby to be both raised by and biologically related to your favorite Noldorin folkhero? Are you fed up with trying to figure out why someone would be called ‘scion of kings’ (multiple) specifically,andwant your High King to be an uncontroversial Fingolfinweon?I present you: my sad Arakáno theory, in short story form).
Relationships: Ereinion Gil-galad & Fingon | Findekáno, Gil-Galad & Arakáno
Series: tolkien ficlets [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2042965
Comments: 26
Kudos: 42





	1. Atto

His first memory is one of an endless white.

  
  
The Helcaraxë is only ever a slaughterhouse in the songs of their people, but what he remembers of it is being held firmly by two warm arms, clad in dark blue trimmed with mottled brown furs, over which he had perched. Seals click and whine their untranslatable songs to them over the Ice and from under it, and soon he is keening and clicking back at them; the arms think that is funny, for he cannot yet form words like their words, and he has very chubby cheeks, much like the seal pups with whom he so desperately tries to play.

The arms are strong; they hold him far above the many dark heads of his tall people. This, then, is his father. His father has a father too, equally strong but not as tall and warm as his own. When the man who is his father’s father reaches for him he cringes back and curls his hands into dark braids, dark braids twined with gold, biting into them for good measure, getting a good taste. Sometimes, when little Gil is very tired, he cannot always tell who is holding him. The wind is very cold and the chest against which he rests is such a vast expanse. His father and his father’s father smell the same; they both wear blue, and people look at them the same way, which is to say, mostly up. But he reaches his sleepy hands for black braids, and is swiftly reassured. There is gold in them. Gil is safe still. He burrows his head into the dark velvet of a doublet and keens a sea-song at a whale while someone says, insistently “Atto!” and then again, now pleadingly, “ _Atto_.” But little Gil has better things to do, like calling up a whale to crash through the Ice before them, just to see it splash in joy or terror.

There are the stars above and the stars below, mirrored in the water and on their bright banners. There are strange lights in the sky, and there are strange lights in their eyes; he has never seen their eyes without, and does not know why this should be strange, only that it is so. Neither the terns nor the snow-geese nor the soft-nosed black seals shine with anything but water on wing and sleek coat; but when he reaches out to dip his fingers in his father (it must be) snatches him away from the edge. It is very unfair. Gil applies himself to crying, determined to show his disagreement, to gain his freedom at last. But the hands just come up to pat his back. He hiccups with anger, unreleased.

* * *

One day the world slides into a new sort of light. What was once white of blueish shade now lights up in flares of shining silver. A great cry goes up around him; he does not like it. The light is very bright, and now the snow makes his eyes water. He turns his face away from the crowd. For a while he sees only blue and black and gold, and so falls asleep to dream of slipping away with the seals, swimming freely where strong arms cannot catch him.

The next memory is of fire.

It is also one full of awful sound; not just the screams that sometimes disturb his sleep when the Ice cracks but metal clashing and ringing, of sinking and striking into things with great force. His hands grab onto the velvet and hold onto it as they run. There is much sound. People are saying very many things. He has only a few words, and he has never deigned to use them. “ _Atto_!” he says, experimentally. The rough treatment stops.

Grey eyes shine down at him, dark eyebrows scrunching; full of wonder though fear is still etched into the features. A hand touches his cheek. The braids hang down around him and take the sky away. There is still clanging, but they are in their own world, where the silver of the moon is not so sharp. Little Gil likes that better. There is already a wrap, holding him in place, but the arms come to rest around him anyway, encircling. “ _Artanáro_.” The voice says, and it is full of affection, as full of it as any seal-song.

But then the wrap is loosening. And someone is taking him away from his father, who says only “be good now” while he kicks and keens his protest. And there is a ringing sound of metal being drawn, and the voice that said “Artanáro.” is speaking with other people now, is calling loudly for them to follow, crying ragged like the snow-geese calling for the wind. Someone pulls a blanket over his head. He thinks they are running. The air smells like blood. Maybe they are hunting.

* * *

When he wakes again, he is being held to a broad chest of velvet blue, and it is shaking like Gil used to shake with angry sobs. He moves his hands up, and catches a dark braid in his mouth. It tastes the way it always has.

“ _Atto_?” he tries experimentally.

There are grey eyes, shining down at him full of tears and –he thinks, maybe—surprise? A small sound escapes the mouth, and it is unfamiliar, though the shape is the same.

But a hand moves up to touch the fat of his cheek just like the hand used to, and if there is no gold in the black now, soon there will be.

Things are quiet again, at last.

* * *

And so little Gil lays himself down to sleep against blue velvet to dream of seal-pups, singing.

-

Fingon twines his brother's gold into the dark before dawn has broken.


	2. Attat

The years that follow are so filled with sorrow and new sights that their people rarely pause for breath, much less to remember time more gladly forgotten. His father is only an early casualty in a long war that fells many. Eventually few remember him for anything other than being tall, and even the memory of his height seems to increase with every year they spend apart from him.

The Sindar who join their ranks are fond of song; but few sing of Arakáno even so, or Argon in their strange buzzing tongue. If he is mentioned at all it is simply to complete the scheme of a rhyme, to count every one of his father’s sons, or to contrast his dark head with their own silver King, who lurks behind an enchanted fence but is said rival even the Aman-enhanced height of the greatest of the Noldor.

His father’s father cannot bear to hear the name mentioned, so after a time few still do. They have all learned to tread carefully around the gaps in the Ice, around the memory of loss never truly escaped. Oblivion is not one of the abilities of the Eldar, but they are so long out of Aman; have had to learn simply not to think of certain things instead. Some become very good at this indeed. After only a few new generations of not-speaking and many more passing away the man who was his father is barely a shadow in texts not often consulted, left out by some of the less fastidious scholars altogether.

And so, when they ask who his father is, he hesitates. To speak the name while Fingolfin is still there to remember it feels almost impossible; even when he is not in the room his presence hoovers over everything. And the one whose braids he chewed and has called ‘ _Atto’_ most often is now not the face barely remembered, but the brother of the one who slowly passed out of history, who lived to become a vital part of it instead.

He is not as tall as his father; not as tall as either of his fathers. Maybe it is the Ice that bit into his bones when they were only just learning how to grow, maybe it is that hardly any of Aman’s Light ever reached his eyes before they all left it behind forever. He has, he thinks, his father’s eyes; but he cannot be sure. The memory of early childhood is as vivid as it is variable, and morphs when emotion requires it of the infant. He knows this because he has asked the healers, sometimes, about his faulty memory, about his lost father whose face blended so seamlessly into that of his brother, his King.

Sometimes he suspects that even on the Ice he didn’t know. Gil-galad, or Artanáro as he was briefly known—had not been an easy burden. He had kicked and screamed and refused to talk for all the long dark years they spent beneath those shifting polar skies, screaming his protest every time he was taken from his tiring father. It might be that in their exhaustion on the Ice he was secretly passed around in his sleep, handed slack and helpless between many arms; it might be that someone plaited a string of gold into a different braid every time he cried, it might be that he fell asleep chewing many different people, for often it is only by that taste and glint of gold in the dark that he remembers now his father.

He doesn’t dare ask. He doesn’t want to ask. Fingolfin leads his horse around on a lead rope and teaches him how to ride; the setting Sun lands its beams on jet so smooth it gains its own gleam, and for a moment catches gold, and his breath in his throat. But a cloud passes and it is gone. The first time he calls him ‘Atto _’_ is only an accident after one many too corrections, and for a moment something seems to freeze in his face. But then a hand comes to touch his cheek in familiar motion, comes to squeeze it as if there is still fat enough there to fool a seal into calling for him from beneath the Ice.

And Fingon—Fingon, whose braids are ever twined with gold, whose heart is full of love and enough heartbreak for a lifetime of this Earth, who holds him through many cold nights and plays his harp when he refuses, again, to sleep, or to speak—Fingon is a father to him in truth, for all that there always remains something about him that does not belong to them. Fingon, who saves his cousin from the mountain; from himself. Fingon, whose face leads armies to march without fear. Fingon, who never loses hope, though he was given so little of it. Fingon, who dies so suddenly and violently, only six cycles of the Sun after Fingolfin rode away on the horse he taught him to ride on. Turukáno is still somewhere in his high mountains, but by him at least he does not remember ever being held. His fathers’ followers send him away, to the Sea, long before the final blow rains down and shatters all their hopes.

He feels at home here, among the Falmari. His hair is dark, his eyes are grey; but he is not as tall as his father, neither the brief giant of the songs nor the one of whom everyone now sings in turn. The stars of polar skies are caught in the depths of his gaze, and the love of many in his heart. All night he goes out unbothered by anyone to spear fishes on his barbed pole, and to listen to the sounds the sea murmuring to the seals and itself, its song shifting with the waves. Less precision is asked of him here among the Sea-people, and his hesitation taken for answer enough; when one day after his father’s death he introduces himself as Ereinion no questions are asked anew. If a few of the refugees from Gondolin and Doriath are bewildered and invent intricate and outlandish lineages for him, more unlikely by the year; well, if it amuses them, who is he to ruin their fun? The world is full of sorrow, and he is well-acquainted with the difference between myth and man. In his family little tends to be left of the latter.

-

One day when the novelty of his strange chosen name has long since worn off a bard of the Lossoth arrives at their island camp wrapped in seal-skin and fur. He sings of a great warrior whose name is not remembered, alive before any memory of Men but sunk well into the awareness of evil. When the Aftercomers first fled further and further North to escape their own cruel kin they found the Orcs acquainted already with the shadow of a great spear, wielded long ago. The Snow-Men had taken up spears in turn or tribute, with which they glid over smooth ice on long sticks, silent as shadow, and struck fear into the enemy aided by the shade cast by ancient story unremembered.

After the guests have gone Gil-galad stays up all night, going through every old Ice-song remembered in which the slayer of some fell beast remains without name despite unexplained imbalances in rhyming but rarely tolerated, and sees many stories coalesce into one dark silhouette cast against the brightness of the Ice, gaining but little detail. Slowly a strong hand emerges strung to simple pentatonic tones, holding a tall spear, charging bravely into things not even yet named, always rushing ahead to protect others without even a thought for himself until his name was no longer spoken.

Still he cannot remember his face.

* * *

But when the dark at last knocks at his own door he takes up his tall spear and walks bravely into into a fate unknown, without even a thought for himself, or what the songs will say.

And though no seal-song is heard this far inland and the sky is dark with smoke, though the only stars visible are those set into the silver of his own shield, though he can only dream of the cold blast of polar wind beneath the crushing palms that burn him away from the only body he has ever known-- even cruel claws slowly lose their grip to many strong arms at last, and he is held secure against blue velvet, held safe again to many black braids coiled with gold, calling and singing him home by every name he has ever known. 


	3. Baby Gil on the Helcaraxë (illustration)




End file.
